Metafictional narratives are often employed in postmodern novels to dig into the self-reflexive dimension of the authors. They emphasise the artificiality of the works to eliminate the boundaries between fiction and reality. Being aware of the structural components of narratives,… Read More ›
Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, one of the most infernal periods in human history ever known to us. Apart from the infamous rule of Nazi, the decline of Communist Eastern European states led to a… Read More ›
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), as its title suggests, implies the power of human imagination through an imaginary universe consisted of numerous surrealist representations of imaginative cities. Inspired by Marco Polo’s pilgrimages, the novel appears to be a product of… Read More ›
Like many of Umberto Eco’s works, The Name of the Rose (1980) is another postmodern novel that deals with the deceiving nature of language. However, although Eco once again makes use of the technique of intertextuality to mock the search… Read More ›
Fiction itself is an imaginative dimension outside the realm of reality. When authors write about dreams, they remove the ‘ontological distance’ (a term coined by David Mitchell). Because dreams are personal experiences, they often appear in modernist literature to emphasise… Read More ›
As many postmodern writers like Umberto Eco claim, the history familiar to us is merely an artificial construction and thus a ‘reality’ made out of falsehoods is crafted. The postmodern notion of history as an accumulated product of multiple falsehoods… Read More ›
Following the publication of City of Glass in 1985, Ghosts was published in the following years, which is the second novel of Auster’s bestselling collection The New York Trilogy (1987). City of Glass emphasises on the theme of the crisis… Read More ›
Many postmodern writers convey the inadequacy of mankind’s imagination to the infinity of the universe with endless repetitions of sublime imageries. In Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944), the imagery of an exitless labyrinth is often employed in his short stories… Read More ›
Metafictional narrative is one of the most significant features fusing the reality and the fictional world together in postmodern literature. The metanarrative of one of the most influential postmodern novels, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), plays… Read More ›
The lack of concrete evidence on the history of the Knights Templar makes them one of the most mysterious and controversial political and religious power in European history. Because of the blurred boundaries between historical facts and legends, the Knights… Read More ›
